MARGARET WHISTLERMARGARET WHISTLER

Unlike Wachner, Chaffin, and West, each of whom became famous on account of their costume design careers, Margaret Whistler’s name was already well known to movie audiences of the 1910s before she began her design career.

She had been a featured actress in no fewer than thirty silent movies before becoming a designer for William Fox Studios in 1919. She was born Louise Margaret Pepper in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 31, 1892, and grew up in Washington, D.C., where she attended Notre Dame Academy, a Catholic girls high school. Her stage name, “Margaret Whistler,” apparently had its origins in an early marriage, as Whistler referred to herself as Mrs. Louise Margaret Whistler in deeds and other legal documents. Claims about Whistler’s pre-Hollywood career—touring with a circus in England and appearing on the vaudeville stage—seem inflated or erroneous.

Whatever led Whistler to the big screen, her path to the wardrobe department clearly followed from there. By 1915, she was designing gowns for silent film actress Cleo Madison, although Whistler acted in seven shorts herself that year. In 1916, Madison directed and starred with Whistler in Virginia and To Another Woman. Whistler designed the costumes for both movies. Around the same time, Whistler also gained notoriety as a painter. Following her last screen appearance in A Beach Nut (1919) with Wallace Beery, Whistler began designing gowns for William A. Fox’s studio. While at Fox, she spent one year designing costumes for exotic screen siren Betty Blythe for her title role in The Queen of Sheba (1921), one of the most lavishly produced films of the 1920s. Directed by J. Gordon Edwards, grandfather of Blake Edwards, the precensorshipera Sheba featured Blythe nude or nearly nude in every scene. Although Whistler designed a total of twenty-eight “gowns” for the star, Blythe would later joke that they all would fit in one shoebox. Whistler remained a designer for the rest of her life, but her work on Queen of Sheba is what she is most remembered for.

As the 1920s drew to a close, Whistler married former automobile dealer Merle G. Farnsworth. By 1930, he was managing a medical laboratory. And by 1932, he left Whistler for his third wife, Myrtle Stewart, a physician from Chicago. Whistler became ill a few years later and died on August 23, 1939, in Los Angeles. She had been designing for Columbia Pictures for about two years prior to her death. She was forty-seven.

Betty Blythe in The Queen of Sheba (1921).

Fritz Leiber in The Queen of Sheba.